When it comes to building the ideal website for your business, not all websites are created equal. While each one brings with it bare minimum search capabilities, the first thing you have to consider is whether or not these stretch far enough to achieve the job you need. Are they providing your visitors with exactly what they need at the push of a button? If the answer is no, then it’s time to look into a smart search engine.
While entering this space can be a little daunting to begin with, smart search engines bring a whole host of benefits you didn’t even know you needed – but won’t be able to survive without. Utilising an intelligent predictive search mechanism means your customers can get what they want even before they know it. The Holy Grail of internet search. This enhances consumer experience then leads to better conversion rates and a higher ROI. The only question your business needs to be asking is what smart search engine is right for your needs?
ElasticSearch in a nutshell
ElasticSearch is one of the most well-known free and open smart search engines on offer for all types of data from textual, numerical and geospatial to structured and unstructured. It was first released in 2010 by developer Shay Banon and has very quickly risen to the height of popularity thanks to its ability to log analytics, offer full-text search, security intelligence and operational intelligence.
It achieves fast results as it searches an index, rather than searching the text directly. What exactly does this mean? ElasticSearch works by essentially scanning the keyword in the index of a book, rather than searching every page of the book.
Of course, it’s not the only option on the market and the other forefront runner for this top position is Apache Solr.
ElasticSearch vs Apache Solr
Apache Solr is another open source, Java-based information retrieval library. Just like ElasticSearch, it has been built on top of Apache Lucene library. This is where the similarities end, while both platforms have the ability to perform full-text searches and faceted searches, when it comes to scalability, deployment presence and more, the differences are vast.
So, which one is best suited to your website needs?
Here at OSKY, our platform of choice is ElasticSearch to provide all the functionality and data needed to ensure your visitors are finding the information they need, fast.
Here’s why it’s so beneficial.
Benefits of ElasticSearch
1. Extensive Search Options
When it comes to search results, ElasticSearch utilises a number of features that together ensure instant results. These include:
- Faceted search: a technique for accessing information according to a faceted classification system, so visitors can explore a collection of information by applying filters.
- Full-text search: searches any data for the best match with a specific phrase.
- Autocomplete: completes a search box on partially typed words based on previous searched
- Geolocation: can be used to geo-localise a search
- Spellcheck: the fuzzy search feature ensures visitors can still find what they need if they make a spelling mistake. A fuzzy query means the terms in the queries don’t have to be the exact match with the terms in the index, results will still match.
2. Fast
When it comes to performance, ElasticSearch has the ability to execute complex queries very fast. It then caches almost all commonly used queries as a filter for the result set a. For every other request containing a cached filter, it checks the result from the cache.
3. Document-oriented
ElasticSearch stores real-world complex entities as structured JSON documents and indexes all fields by default.
4. Scalable
ElasticSearch can be horizontally scaled as needed. You can start with a single node, and as the workload grows, scale across multiple nodes.
5. Compatible
Developed in Java, ElasticSearch is compatible to run on every platform.
6. Multilingual
ElasticSearch is available in various languages, which makes it user-friendly around the world.
Choosing ElasticSearch
At OSKY, we only ever recommend the best software for your website needs, which is why ElasticSearch is such an easy choice. Its superior features ensure it stands out, with new functionalities constantly being updated so it stays relevant and ahead of the field. At a very basic level, it offers high-performance search results that give your customers what they want instantaneously, increasing your conversion rates and ROI.
